


the rising tide

by Verbyna



Series: rifle, scissor, stone [7]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Beyonce bootlegs, Eric "out of the frying pan and into the fire" Bittle, Gore and Humor, Graphic description of torture, Harm to Children, Justin "murder scene Martha Stewart" Oluransi, M/M, Memory Loss, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Snipers, twisted romance tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-14
Updated: 2017-08-14
Packaged: 2018-12-15 06:24:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11800278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: Jack had been delivered in a body bag, which Kent had opened with a flourish after Eric’s life had already flashed before his eyes. He’d barely felt Kent’s arm around him, angling him so he was between Kent and the medical team’s guns, but when they reached Kent’s car, it had been Eric’s choice to get in. To make the trade: his services for Jack’s safety.





	the rising tide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedusaur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedusaur/gifts), [SummerFrost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SummerFrost/gifts).



> beta by jedusaur. for j, who had faith that i could write the brutal assassins au she wanted, and gabby, whose big brother bittyparse au singlehandedly pulled me thru the crappiest month at work.
> 
> if you'd like more specific warnings re: the tags, drop me a message

“Doing a little work for George is how I stay in her good graces, but it’s expensive to live on the run. This right here,” Kent says, pointing at the printout he’s holding, “is the meat and potatoes.” He blinks. “More meat than potatoes, obviously. The meat and, you know.”

“I think I got it, thanks,” says Eric. Kent gives him a look for interrupting. Eric watches him steadily back.

“Anyway, I need a sniper for this one. Even the Abattoir boys would put a bullet in me first, but you wouldn’t, wouldja? I gave you Jack all safe and sound.”

Jack had been delivered in a body bag, which Kent had opened with a flourish after Eric’s life had already flashed before his eyes. He’d barely felt Kent’s arm around him, angling him so he was between Kent and the medical team’s guns, but when they reached Kent’s car, it had been Eric’s choice to get in. To make the trade: his services for Jack’s safety.

There will be a next time, probably, and a time when Kent doesn’t offer at all. And Jack won’t come back. And then Eric will be disposable.

“Are you hungry?” Kent asks, still smiling. “I’m hungry. Let’s give room service a workout, then we’ll go over the brief.”

Resigned and, on further thought, hungry, Eric reaches for the menu on the nightstand.

Kent got them a room with a queen bed, a short drop to the car parked below. He leans over Eric to look at the menu, humming as the mattress dips, and Eric wishes his skin was crawling. It’s not. No more than usual.

 

+

 

The thing about Kent is that he’s very peaceful to be around. Peaceful like rowing out into the middle of a lake at night. Enough space to think, but if you fell in, or jumped, no one would find you for days. It would be a closed casket funeral.

 _You are not safe,_ Eric tells himself. They’re never more than twenty feet from each other, and Eric can’t help but remember all the ways Kent could hurt him, but he’d rather be here than back at HQ. He doesn’t have to pretend with Kent; he doesn’t have to be anything but a body that slows down when it’s about to shoot a rifle.

Eric should be afraid, not relaxed. He wonders if he disappears when he’s quiet, like Kent does. If people can smell the crazy on him under the niceness.

 _You’re alone when you’re with him. He’s like empty calories._ But Eric’s beginning to suspect that it goes for both of them.

+

 

“The target’s my uncle,” Kent tells Eric as they wait for their new scopes to be delivered. The sun is barely up, a thin line of watery yellow along the windshield. Eric counts bricks in the bridge they parked under to avoid meeting Kent’s eyes.

“Does it bother you?” he asks. It would bother him to kill his relatives; he’d enjoy it, and he’d hate that he enjoyed it. He had good reason to leave his home.

A car drives past and they tense up, but it keeps going and they settle back in. “It doesn’t bother me that I’ll kill him,” Kent says eventually. “He sold me off to pay my dad’s debts to Alicia. But like. I don’t remember being a kid, and he does. He knew me. It’s all gone when he dies.”

“What do you mean you don’t remember?” Eric asks. “Everyone remembers it, at least a little. Whether they want to or not.”

He hadn’t meant for the last bit to slip out, but Kent doesn’t press. He points at an approaching car through the passenger side window, arm hovering in front of Eric’s face, and Eric gets the sudden impulse to bite down on Kent’s sleeve and shake his arm like a dog, _look at me, look at me, look at me._

Then it passes, and he goes to get the money out of the trunk.

 

+

 

Kent’s uncle owns a casino and has security around the clock, and his staff is either too scared or too well-paid to be bribed. It makes Eric dislike him on principle. It’s always easier to have someone on the inside. He could be stuck on a roof all night otherwise, and it’s exhausting to stay alert indefinitely.

Kent needs a sniper in the first place because he’s been legally dead since he was eighteen, he explains, so he can’t just waltz in for a family reunion. “Though I’d love to see his face when he realizes he threw me to the wolves and they didn’t eat me.”

“That would be cannibalism,” Eric says. He doesn’t mean it as a joke, but he likes to see Kent laughing.

“True. Not a lot of people have the stomach for this. I’m, like, the unicorn of pulling answers out of hostile witnesses.”

“Mixing your animal metaphors there. Wolves are opportunistic killers, right? And with the kind of ship this man’s running, so are we.”

“Fucker,” Kent says. Eric snorts.

They’re on the roof of a building a hundred yards from the hotel where Kent’s uncle will soon be staying. Kent had taken a room for day use and then asked a receptionist to print a train ticket off a flash drive. They’d spent a frustrating afternoon figuring out the hotel software, but now they have a list of all the rooms where Kent’s uncle and his staff will stay.

Eric adjusts his scope and writes down the distance to the biggest window in the suite. Kent lowers his night vision binoculars and puts his hand on Eric’s back to look through the scope while Eric scribbles. He leaves his hand there when he’s done, and it feels good even through Eric’s jacket, a counterpoint to the cold roof and windchill. He smells nice.

“Vee one,” Kent whispers in Eric’s ear, making him shiver. V1: take-off can no longer be aborted, Eric knows, because his daddy’s oldest brother was Air Force. But Eric’s not a pilot; he has a choice right up until he squeezes the trigger.

“Boom,” he whispers back anyway.

“Boom,” Kent echoes, and slides his hand lower.

 

+

 

They didn’t have sex again, not at first. Eric was still worried about Jack, seeing him in that body bag every time he closed his eyes. But that was before Kent told him about his last time at the Abattoir, how Jack closed Kent’s eyes, how he put his hand over Kent’s mouth for a second and pinched his nose shut and made him choke on his own blood before he called for medical help.

Eric doesn’t tell Kent that Jack’s been sleeping in his room every night since. He doesn’t want to talk about the way it makes him feel owned, like he doesn’t deserve any privacy, and watched; if he did, Kent would pry out Eric’s relief when Jack was taken and Eric could finally sleep again. And if he got to that point, he’d realize how well Eric’s been sleeping next to Kent.

He might mistake it for something else, especially with the kind of sex they’re having.

Kent holds Eric’s hands when he fucks him. He presses his lips against Eric’s forehead or the back of his neck, and he doesn’t bite like he did the first time, almost a year ago in Virginia. He holds Eric, and Eric clings to him, lets his body do what it needs. They kiss with their eyes closed and Eric locks his ankles behind Kent’s back, comes in the tight space between them under the cloying duvets, sweaty and overheated and his mind back in Boston.

They have sex like they’re making love. They’re play-acting it, fucking like real people do, and it scratches an itch that Eric doesn’t want to call loneliness but has no other name for. It’s an animal sort of understanding, like their bodies are sharing something entirely beyond the things they tell each other; it always feels like something they shouldn’t know how to do, because it’s not for them, for broken boys who are only good at breaking people.

He looks up at Kent’s face sometimes and thinks, _this is the closest either of us will get._ Just two animals being kind to each other because they have nothing to lose. Kent, with his childhood burned out of him along with everything else, pushing Jack at Eric every time he tries to understand what they were trying to do when they ruined him; Eric, who ran right into Jack’s collar when he tried to run from himself.

He doesn’t tell Eric about Jack sleeping in his bed because he doesn’t want Kent to think he wants to be rescued. He knows there’s no escaping Jack’s orbit. He doesn’t know what would be worse: Kent trying to get him out, or Kent saying the truth out loud again, gently this time.

 

+

 

The target checks into the hotel with his posse at 2200 on a Wednesday. Eric has been in position for two hours already, working his way through a couple of protein bars as Kent gave him a rundown of his favorite bagel places in New York, ranked from least- to most-likely to get him killed if he showed his face at the counter. Life on the run with a giant bounty on his head seems to be the only thing keeping Kent trim, Eric thinks, and he tells Kent so.

The laugh it gets is cut short by the arrival of a small convoy of black cars. “He’s here,” Kent says, voice suddenly colorless. “Six guards as expected. Heading into the lobby. Stand by.”

Eric lets his body get heavy against the rooftop. He swallows the last bite of protein bar and glances at his watch, then triple-checks his rifle. Right before his mind stills for the final stretch of a hit, he gets the most random thoughts; this time it’s an argument he heard once in the armory at HQ about subsonic bullets. They’re perfectly accentable at a hundred yards, Eric knew even then, but he hadn’t interrupted. No one likes a know-it-all.

The lights come on in the suite. The curtains are drawn back, but he won’t have a clear shot at a static target unless he’s sitting on the couch or sleeping on the left side of the bed. Two guards come in with him and do a thorough sweep, but neither of them thinks to close the curtains, bless their incompetent hearts.

Unless they don’t know anyone who wants their boss dead to the point of hiring snipers, and their professional paranoia is mostly about surveillance.

“Target is in location,” he reports to Kent. “Waiting for a clear shot.” Then, because he’s in that place where everything is clear and he’s immovable, as unavoidable as the hand of God, he asks, “Who took out the contract?”

Nothing. A whole minute of nothing, and when he’s this locked in, a minute is endless. He doesn’t repeat the question. He knows Kent heard him.

“Do you have a shot?” Kent asks.

“Not yet,” Eric breathes out. “He’s dead anyway.”

Another pause. “Vee one,” Kent says. “Kill him for me.”

One of the guards starts to twitch the curtain closed then, just as the target - as Kent’s uncle, the one who gave him to the Zimmermanns - sits on the couch with a glass of bourbon.

“Boom,” Eric whispers, and squeezes the trigger.

 

+

 

Later, after Eric scrambles down twelve flights of stairs hauling his equipment and nearly brains himself on a banister, they drive back to Boston. Eric’s been watching Kent’s flushed face as he comes down from his high, shakes giving way to fine tremors in his fingers.

Twenty minutes outside Boston, Kent switches off his Best of Beyonce bootleg and pulls over into a parking lot. “The standard rate’s already been wired into your account.”

“So everything looks legit,” Eric says. He picked up the word from Kent, probably. No one at HQ uses it anymore. “Why didn’t you kill him yourself? Why did you trade Jack for me?”

“Your ride’s almost here. I asked for the cute one from disposal.”

“Ransom?” Eric asks, at a loss.

“Yeah. His first cleanup was one of mine, did he tell ya?” Eric shakes his head. “At his campus. Turns out he had a knack.”

“Kent.”

“I wanted to see if you would.”

Eric huffs out an exasperated breath and thunks his head against the headrest. “You already knew I would. This wasn’t some experiment, you knew perfectly well that I would. Why did you want me to?”

Kent’s eyes are very big and very green in the neon light of the parking lot. It reminds Eric of when they first met, at that abandoned gas station where Kent pulled teeth and nails and secrets out of someone while Eric kept guard, and they talked and talked on the roof under a sky so dark and starry that it felt like they were alone in the world. But Eric was new then, to this life and to Kent; he didn’t know he’d come to be so angry on Kent’s behalf. Angry enough for both of them.

“I wanted you to kill for me,” Kent says. “I didn’t want to put him down. I wanted him fucking _murdered_ for what he did. I wanted it to--”

“--mean something,” Eric finishes. Kent nods, and Eric’s heart twists in his chest. “It did. Kenny, look at me. It did.”

“Get out,” Kent says.

Eric was reaching out for him, but he pulls his hands back like they’re scalded. “What?”

“Murder scene Martha Stewart’s here for you,” Kent says, and looks meaningfully at the car idling across the parking lot. Ransom’s eyes are so wide that Eric can see them from here. Eric’s laugh takes him by surprise, eases the raw ache of how much he doesn’t want to be in the warren of HQ after all this freedom.

“Jack’s been sleeping in my bed,” he tells Kent on an impulse.

“I’m sorry,” Kent says, and Eric knows he means it. It feels as bad as he imagined it would.

He doesn’t look back when he gets out of the car. Ransom leans over to open the passenger side door for him, and by the time he sits down, the parking lot is empty, like Kent was never there.

He smiles at Ransom. Ransom visibly twitches away, so Eric relaxes his face and stares dead ahead.

“Take me to Jack. He’ll want to see I’m safe.”

“Rhode Island, then. Right. Okay.”

Eric turns slowly, enjoying the way Ransom pulls away from whatever’s on his face a little too much. “Why’s Jack at the Abattoir?”

Ransom swallows nervously. “He’s taking the hit on Parson. He was just. When he woke up and heard Parson took you, it was. He--he took the contract. He wants Parson dead.”

**Author's Note:**

> unfollow me on tumblr @soundslikepenance or on twitter @sitdownlee


End file.
